


Endless Forms

by narie



Series: The Entangled Bank [3]
Category: Glee
Genre: Academia, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death, Offscreen homophobic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-17
Updated: 2011-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-23 19:37:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/254090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narie/pseuds/narie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many languages Blaine Anderson does not speak. That of the heart, however, he is confident he is fluent in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Endless Forms

**Author's Note:**

> Many many thanks are owed to my betas over on LJ-land, peachpai, lls_mutant and ctraltdelete, for their willingness to help with holes, and to halona for encouragement.

Blaine's grandfather was a scientist. Blaine had always known this, of course, but he only learned what it could mean after freshman year, when he was allowed to take all of his finals orally because his cast did not let him hold a pen. That summer, in the absence of anything better, his parents cautiously approached him and offered the opportunity to exchange the endlessness of small town Ohio for the stifling alienness of the small patch of Louisiana bayou that had been his grandfather's chosen field site for far longer than Blaine had been alive.

Blaine thought long before answering. His interactions with his grandfather had been brief, through the years. They had not gone far beyond careful, guarded pats in the back and small bills awkwardly slipped into smaller hands, both of them growing bigger with age. When Blaine was a very young child there were also stories of terrifying, fantastic, long gone animals: creatures so extraordinary that sometimes, looking back, Blaine could never remember which ones his nightmares conjured and which ones were truly real, their spiny bellies and projecting eyes and leaf-like bodies trapped in rock for millions of years and then too precious to be displayed openly in museums.

On Blaine's seventh birthday there had also been the little brown and rust gecko in its terrarium on the back porch table, the small acrylic cage the only one of Blaine's presents not wrapped in bright Batman paper. "I thought you could name him Charles," his grandfather had said in that accent of his, not so much regional as academic, clipped, concise and unerringly precise. Through the years, as Blaine grew older, he decided that it suited the man. There were black and white photographs of him in the albums Blaine's mother lovingly curated, always one in a group of stern young men in stiff starched shirts and suspenders, standing in rooms cluttered with specimen jars and peering into microscopes less sophisticated than the ones currently in the biology classroom at Dalton. They were always smiling convivially at each other, safe in their conviction that with every fragment of knowledge gained they were not demystifying life but instead adding to its beauty and its wonder. This, as far as Blaine could see, was the only thing his grandfather had ever been passionate about, and in the presence of that knowledge it should have been obvious from the start, but it took him a few years to learn who his lizard's namesake was. He still remembered how that summer, when it became clear that Charlie was never going to grow beyond eight inches, he had been forced to accept that his own choice for a name was ill-suited, but to this day the old nickname sometimes surfaced, in the privacy of his bedroom, whenever Blaine had one-sided conversations with his pet so they could both remember neither of them was alone.

Blaine said yes to his parents' offer. His grandfather said, "pack light," and, "don't forget your pocketknife," and, "bring a hat;" what he didn't say was, "this place is crawling with leeches," or, "the internet is dial-up," or, "the mosquitoes are positively ravenous." Once there Blaine would be unable to decide if he appreciated the absence of warnings and honest truths or resented it, although every time his cast itched and the urge to root inside it with a twig became nearly overwhelming he would lean towards the latter.

He was met at the airport by his grandfather's assistant, one of his graduate students from Vermont where the man taught; her name was Lesley. They only recognised one another at the arrivals lounge because she had been told to be on the look out for a "short frumpy adolescent," but it took them longer that it should have, because she had not been on the lookout for someone with a broken arm. Blaine, who instead had expected to see his grandfather introduced himself with awkward courtesy, and when she offered to take his bag, accepted, relieved, and attempted to shrug off the weariness of the journey. Multiple times he caught her staring at him out of the corner of her eye, eyes narrowed in curiosity at his cast, and pre-empted her inevitable questions by saying, "It's only for a couple of weeks, it'll come off soon." The rest of their conversation centred on how his grandfather was waiting for them back in Picayune and whether Blaine was hungry or not. Once in the car he examined her as she drove, taking in her faded utilitarian clothes, her wispy hair pulled back into a taut ponytail, and the thinness of her mouth. Blaine, who could not even hold a book open to distract himself and whose only reprieves were music and conversation, thought of the weeks looming ahead of him and was suddenly filled with despair.

This was to be the first time in years that Blaine had been in the company of his grandfather for more than a few hours, and also the first time his parents were not there to bridge the chasms between their generations. They crossed the state line as the sun set and arrived in small, already-sleepy Picayune, where he was greeted with a perplexed, "Your father didn't say you'd still be in a cast," and a stiff one-armed hug, all of it confirmation that agreeing to come here was the worst idea he had ever had, worse still than going to the dance in the first place, because this time around he had all the information and should have been able to predict the outcome before hand. Yawning and tired he withdrew to investigate the house he'd be sharing that summer, in search of a space to claim as his own.

He found an empty room with a bed behind the second door he opened, and he shook his bag upside down and let his clothes tumble out, shoving them aside to unroll his sleeping bag. Unshowered, still wearing the clothes from the trip he lay down for a few minutes and woke up to sunlight streaming through flimsy curtains. He yearned to stretch his fingers, to bend his wrist and rotate his arm again, to sleep well at night and to play on his 360 and on his piano both, and stayed in bed thinking about these things until the sounds of someone else's breakfast lured him to the kitchen. Both his grandfather and Lesley watched him over cups of coffee as he assembled his own meal, choosing cereal over toast because it was easier to pour milk into a bowl than to spread jam and butter when you only had one arm, and his grandfather told him to write down what he wanted to eat on the weekly grocery list, but Blaine dictated his choices that evening instead.

\---

They drove to the bayou in a tired 4x4 and stopped at the entrance to buy bait shop sandwiches for lunch. It was pretty enough, but far too hot to appreciate properly, and the humidity made breathing difficult for Blaine, ribs tight around his lungs, even though he was used to hot Midwestern summers. His grandfather's gaze fell on him, clinical and piercing, as he struggled into his borrowed waders one-handed, motions skewed by an unexpected stiffness in the material probably born from other people's sweat.

"We should find you something to do," his grandfather eventually said while staring in his direction. Blaine could not shake the feeling that he was nevertheless being spoken about, not to. "But still, no net for you. Hm. That's going to make things more difficult. Come."

After a brief conversation with Lesley they headed down a small winding path to the edge of one of the many river arms flowing through the site, and Blaine found himself assigned to collecting crayfish into buckets so they could be marked and released again, and so some hapless undergraduate could follow in his footsteps next year and repeat things all over again. But collecting crayfish meant learning to spot them against the river bed and learning to grab them from the river bed, and both of these tasks were new and foreign to Blaine, who already felt inadequate enough with his right arm permanently curled against his chest. With little prior explanation his grandfather pointed at a mottled spot in the river bottom and showed him how to reach into the water and with a single, decisive motion pull out an animal, quickly turning it over, keeping his wrinkled hands out of reach of its rapidly snapping claws.

"Now you do it - there's another one down there."

Blaine followed his gaze, but saw nothing. "It's just," he hesitated, "the cast..."

"You have one good arm, don't you?" his grandfather asked, but it was not really a question as much as a statement of fact. "And your father said it was some fancy new material, waterproof."

"Well, yes."

"Don't make sudden moves or fall flat on your face and you'll be fine, then," and he threw back the crayfish into the water with a small splash. It scurried along the riverbed and buried itself under a thin layer of sediment but having seen it all happen Blaine could easily spot it, and suddenly five more as well. Some of the animals were big and ugly, others were small and slender, and by the afternoon he had collected enough to fill the single bait bucket his grandfather left him with before returning to his own work. After lunch Lesley walked back with him to the riverbank and gave him a digital camera and a small metallic punch. "You've got to check the telson and if there's nothing there, mark it like this," she demonstrated, punching a meticulous series of small holes that she told him were this season's code into the hard carapace of an unmarked animal, "and take a photograph - make sure you get the scale bar in. And if there's something, take a photograph and make sure everything is clearly visible so we can crosscheck it later. And then you throw them back in. And if you think they're molting just let them go, because it's totally pointless to mark them if they're going to shed in a week."

His first day was not very productive, not between the newness of it all and the slight sadness he felt whenever he looked at the bucket of crayfish half-heartedly attempting to escape him and his hole puncher, and above all, the awkwardness of his cast. He had no idea what a molting crayfish looked like, he had never knowingly seen one, and he didn't know if that was making him overly lenient or overly cautious in his marking, but he strove to be consistent and not disappoint. Near the end of the day, when only silt and water remained and Blaine was wondering whether he was supposed to move to a different segment of the river or sweep the same pool all over again and quantify his own worth as a field assistant, his grandfather came to find him. "So? Better than Ohio? I brought your father out here once and he absolutely hated it, did you know?"

"It's different. I've never done anything like this," lied Blaine. In school they had done small transects for biology class, dividing part of the football field into one-yard by one-yard squares and partnered off with instructions to find as many different living things within them as possible. The entire exercise had felt rather pointless to Blaine and his partner both, although even with as little effort as possible they had still walked away with seventeen kinds of plants and eleven dead insects. After a day's worth of it he was coming to suspect that monitoring crayfish was the college equivalent, but when his grandfather bent over and enquired about his progress he seemed to actually care about what Blaine had to say in reply, mulling over his words carefully. It was this above all that emboldened him enough to ask, "Why do we care about the crayfish, anyhow?"

"The crayfish," his grandfather said, "are an indicator species. They let us monitor the entire ecosystem because they are fragile and extremely sensitive to variations in their environment. So if their numbers fluctuate drastically from year to year, or if we detect anything strange happening to them, that indicates that there's a bigger problem. So what you're doing is rather important, although I'm sure it doesn't feel like it. "

 

\---

Every morning when he woke Blaine would douse himself in DEET and low-grade SPF, although he soon gave up on remedying the awkward tan lines on his arm. He would fill his water bottle, meaning to offer to fill his grandad's and Lesley's as well, but he would always be too late. By the time he emerged into the kitchen they would already have prepared themselves for the day and were inevitably washing the remnants of their breakfasts down the sink. The three of them would pile into the jeep and drive the ten miles to the bayou, where they would spend the day attending to their given tasks. By the end of the first week Blaine could reach into the water confidently enough that the crayfish did not have the chance to attack him with their claws, though he had paid dearly for that knowledge. His cast had remained dry, but his left hand was full of slowly healing cuts and scrapes that would sting when washed, yet although the work was monotonous and tedious to undertake in the heat, it was now accompanied a certain satisfaction to proving himself useful and adept.

Lunch would be eaten together with academic conversation, a language Blaine was not privy to. On the hours and days his grandfather complained were too hot to think properly in, Blaine discovered that he did not share his and Lesley's mordant sense of humour; they traded not so much jokes but sarcastic asides and gossip about the tenure reviews of people Blaine had never heard of. They critiqued publication records and dismissed the theories of people who were strangers to Blaine and whose names were conversationally flung around like those of unpalatable neighbours, but when the conversation crossed some ill-defined line, with unexpected nobility his grandfather would look at Blaine and sometimes remind Lesley of their one rule. "No _ad hominens_ " he would say, and steer their discourse back to mislabelled figures on conference posters.

In the evenings Lesley uploaded GPS data and made maps on her laptop - of what, Blaine did not know. The first few days he had asked her questions she had answered with increasing brevity, her words terse and spliced within a lengthy conversation with her aging computer about its failings. To pass the time he tried to teach himself to write with his left hand but his letters were terrible, the usual movements that gave rise to the usual glyphs awkward and stilted when mirror-imaged in a way that nothing else he had attempted had been before. She would watch him, he knew, eyes alighting on him whenever she rose to get water, and one night she finally asked, "What happened to your hand?"

Blaine was forced to tersely admit that he did not know, and Lesley stared at him. For a second Blaine saw her wonder whether he was being wilfully obtuse or merely pathetic, but she licked her lips and carefully said, "How does that work?"

"I don't remember most of that night," which was the truth.

She was softer after that, and Blaine resented the maternal instincts his confession had awakened, like he needed to be pitiful before he could be seen as likeable. Some evenings, when she gave up on her computer with a frustrated grunt, they would play something that resembled Uno using two poker decks; she always shuffled but dealt half the hands for Blaine, who struggled to hold the cards but would not admit it aloud. She even suggested driving to New Orleans on the Fourth so Blaine could see the city lights and the fireworks and he accepted, and reminded himself that there was a world beyond the mangrove and the river that he would return to after his cast came off.

"You're a strange kid," she told him as they made their way back to the car. "I mean, what are you even doing here? This is totally not your thing, anyone can see."

\---

His grandfather was never jovial, he was not amicable. Vital and spry, he was "one of those academics whose retirement came and went without him noticing," Lesley had said one evening. Blaine watched and studied him; where Lesley insisted on seeing a certain avuncular benevolence he found only gruff cold distance and privately disagreed with her assessment. His opinion was confirmed whenever it was just the two of them in Blaine's small riverine domain, grandchild and grandfather crouching together, and little in between. "I had a look last night through some of the crayfish and some of the numbers Lesley collected," he told Blaine early in the summer, "and you're not quite getting it right."

"Sorry," Blaine answered sheepishly. "What am I doing wrong?"

"You're being too conservative. I'm not going to make you redo the earlier transects because we should be able to get a good enough signal if you start doing it right, but from now on if you have questions about whether you need to mark something or not I want you to leave it in the bucket and let one of us decide, you're throwing out too many juveniles. And your marking needs to be clearer. I don't want you to think I'm being harsh," he added when Blaine made no reply, "but this is bigger than you, remember. We can't afford to have it all ruined in just one summer."

"No, of course not," Blaine agreed, but what he wanted was to complain. He knew what he was supposed to do, Lesley had showed him and Blaine was not stupid, but it was not all that easy, holding an unhappy animal still and punching holes into its tail when he only had one hand to do it with, and he would have hoped his grandfather would have remembered this. Instead he found a watchful eye turned to him more often after that, subtle but intrusive supervision that he resented. Sporadically, however, this sudden attention would make him think with guilt of the anonymous undergraduate student whose summer job he had stolen.

"Good, then," his grandfather said, rising and dusting his hands on his worn field trousers. Blaine moved too, to let him pass. He stepped wrong on a mossy rock as he shifted, overbalancing in spite of his rubber soles. Before he had a chance to brace his fall on his broken wrist his grandfather grabbed his shoulder and straightened him. "Steady on," he said, patting him on the back before walking away.

\---

Four weeks into the field season the morning finally came when they dropped Lesley off at the refuge; it was his grandfather who drove with him the hour to the hospital in New Orleans, the closest covered by his parents' insurance. When the cast was finally cut away Blaine was hesitant. It had been a bad break, and after so long he was almost surprised to discover that his bones had not overhealed into a single unyielding clump of stiffness, that somehow they had remembered instead the shape they ought to hold, the spaces they ought to occupy. It struck Blaine that he had never questioned how they knew to do that the first time around, when he had been nothing but a fish-sized babe curled up into himself inside his mother's womb. Life just was, except that now he knew it really was not that simple.

All through the return drive he rotated his arm side to side, he flexed his wrist experimentally, he clenched his hand into a tight fist, he wriggled his fingers and his wrist all at once and he held both arms straight in front of him. The catalogue of the new ways in which they differed was extensive and he smiled ruefully to himself, marking the unusual lines where his skin jumped from honey golden to pale. His left arm was wider now, thicker and darker; there was no disguising the new pronounced bump of his right wrist bone, which he rubbed over and over, or the way the entire arm looked ill and sickly and thin. He'd been told to do exercises to rebuild strength and regain muscle tone, and they would have to see about physiotherapy when he returned home, but at that moment all he wanted was to play the piano and continue to quantify all the ways in which he no longer was who he used to be.

He called his mother to tell her the news and they chatted briefly. "How's Charlie," he asked, "are you taking care of him?"

"Yes, of course I am," she reassured him. "He's just finished molting again."

"Ok," he said, hesitating before adding, "Tell him I miss him." He did not think himself too old for this kind of sentiment, although some people had told him otherwise.

"Who's Charlie?" his grandfather asked sometime after Blaine hung up, tone inquisitive like he had only overheard enough of the conversation to misunderstand it.

"My gecko - the one you got me."

"You still have him?"

"Of course."

"Good, good - they're an interesting species, you know, endangered in the wild but extremely well distributed in captivity," and Blaine started to drift. He liked Charlie not because he was exotic, or because he was a rare morph or whatever other qualities his grandfather found noteworthy, but because Charlie was there for him. Blaine was fairly confident Charlie did not love him, not the way Blaine understood the word, and sometimes that would bother him. He had no idea what he was to Charlie, whether Charlie was even capable of comprehending things as complex as Blaine and his world. Maybe Charlie tolerated him because Blaine dusted three crickets with calcium powder once a week and with a quick muttered apology dropped them into his terrarium; maybe even a gecko was capable of something more profound than that. His grandfather resolutely said no when Blaine interrupted and asked, and began talking about neural complexity instead, but Charlie always walked up and down Blaine's arms with a comfort he did not show anyone else, and the illusion of affection was hard to dispel.

Back on the site they checked in with Lesley over their radios and then his grandfather stayed with Blaine during what little remained of the morning, showing him how to use a net to trawl the river bottom for animals now that he had two hands. One of the crayfish died while in the bucket, and he pointed out the names of each pair of limbs too quickly for Blaine to follow along: antennae, mandibles, maxilia, chelipeds, pleopods, uropods, telson, and the gills at the base of each limb, pale and almost hairy, revealed as he carelessly tore them out one by one and laid them out for Blaine to see and study and presumably learn, talking all the while about patterning and segmentation and convergence and other things that Blaine did not really understand, but could again see made his grandfather happy. In that precise voice of his he said, "There you have it, young man; now you can impress anyone you like at a fancy dinner table," and carelessly rinsed the bucket in the river, clasping Blaine's shoulder as he hoisted himself up to walks away, back to his own work. Watching broken limbs drift away slowly in the current, turning his words over in his head, Blaine stayed still for a while, moving only when Lesley radioed to ask if he wanted any lunch.

\---

After seven weeks working together saying goodbye to his grandfather and Lesley was awkward. She pulled him aside, gave him a quick hug and told him to stay safe, while his grandfather clasped his shoulder and, with a curiously unguarded look and the beginnings of a smile, said, "It's been a pleasure having you around, Blaine. Let me know if you want to come back next year, so long as there are no more broken bones." Saying hello to his parents was more awkward still.

On the phone his mother had told him, "Your father has a surprise for you when you get back here, honey," and once in Ohio Blaine slid off the backseat of the family car to find an old rust-bucket parked in their driveway. His father said, laying a casual hand on Blaine's shoulder, "I thought you and I could try to get it up and running, plus the work will do you good, get some muscle back into that scrawny arm of yours," and the car, mechanical, systematic and uncomplicated in its own way, filled the rest of summer. There were jagged metal edges that cut and bright hot sparks that burned, oil that dripped and softened stiff joints and made a home under Blaine's nails no matter how hard he attempted to scrub it out, conversations held entirely over manuals and back-ordered supplies that were, he was confident, about nothing else, and no bird calls disguised their silence when they worked, no soundtrack of slowly flowing water.

They compared online images to the reality in front of them, always looking for the correct groove or nut or bolt under layers of grime and rust, and throughout it all Blaine thought of the last few weeks. His grandfather's quiet presence was so similar to his father's that sometimes, when they worked, he would wonder why the magic of heredity had not worked for him. How could Blaine himself be so different from the man in front of him; how could the chain of inheritance have broken down so? Blaine was earnest and sincere, and his father was too, that much was true, but Blaine had never treated his feelings like they were specimens in a mystifying menagerie. Blaine - and here, he told himself, was the difference - knew how to feel, and had somehow been born into a family that did not, that could not begin to comprehend the bounteous joy of emotion, the grandiosity of it all.

Being back home reminded him of how he had felt before going to Louisiana. He was angry. He wanted to rage and scream and draw attention to the injustice of it all, from the twinge on his wrist to the irrationality of other people's hate. But every time he came downstairs for dinner and the conversation flowed pleasantly and calmly, or every time his father and him restored one more part of the car as their mother watched them from the kitchen window or brought them lemonade to drink he was confronted by the impossibility of his desires. Shouting would only perplex his parents and make them look at him with that unremitting benevolence they excelled in, so far removed from the reality of the genuine expressions of love that Blaine wanted and expected from them. So when the day finally came when turning the ignition on the old Chevy resulted in more than a sputter and a groan and a dark cloud of exhaust, Blaine rejoiced. He had been looking forward to this since returning home and being confronted with the car and his father's plans for them, because it marked the ending of this strange, forced bonding time, but his father had different plans in mind.

"They do driver's ed at your new school, don't they?" he asked when they were sitting down at the good Westerville diner, celebratory milkshakes - milkshakes, Blaine scoffed, a whole summer of penance reduced to that - at hand. In the morning they had cleaned the car inside and out until every last detail shone and repeatedly congratulated each other on their success and work with words that felt thinner every time they left Blaine's mouth.

"Yes, dad." Blaine knew he was being taciturn and sullen, but it did not bother him, for once. He had spent half the summer in a cast and the rest of it so far rebuilding a car, and as far as he could tell no one, besides Lesley, had actually cared in the slightest as to why, choosing instead to talk about anything else. He felt entitled to a tantrum, or at the very least, as close as he could come to one. He drank deeply to fill the silence, but still had to fight the urge to cringe when he accidentally slurped.

"I bet none of the other boys will have a car like this. Next summer you'll be able to drive it all you want, take it out and impress your new friends," his father said, smiling at him. "But I guess for now I'll have to take care of it."

"That's fine," Blaine replied indifferently, and his father's expression fell.

"Son," he said. "You know if there is something bothering you, you can talk to us. Your mother and I, we care for you very much, and we missed having you around this summer. It was quiet in the house, without you."

Blaine could not finish his shake quickly enough, wished for nothing more than to escape the conversation and be safely left alone. He winced as the sudden cold flooded his head but resolutely drank on, until his straw hit the bottom of the glass and he could finally justify pushing his chair back and getting up. "Thanks, but I'm fine, dad. Let's go home, I think I forgot to feed Charlie."

By the time school started and Blaine nervously smoothed the lapels on his new Dalton uniform for the first time his tan lines had evened out and his right arm was wiry and strong again. His piano playing was not the same and probably would never be, not after the weeks of forced stillness and loss of muscle tone, after the fraying of ligaments by minuscule shards of bone. He had spent the last days of summer irrationally overworking himself at the keys in a desperate attempt to get back what he used to have, until his hands protested and the tendons swelled with irritation; the sight and feel of them pulsing beneath his skin far more upsetting than the clinical starkness of the cast had been, the machinery of life so readily exposed - and disturbed. It was frightening.

\---

The following summer, weeks into the Deepwater Horizon disaster, as Blaine drove the old Chevy into Columbus for PFFLAG meetings, and the thick blackness threatened to spill from sea to shore, his grandfather had a sudden heart attack and died, collapsing to the ground halfway through a conference call about the state of his beloved bayou. Blaine did not cry at the funeral, spending most of it absently rubbing at a phantom ache in his right wrist instead, and willing the speeches to end, but for the next two weeks every time he let Charlie run up and down his arm or changed the bedding on the terrarium his eyes moistened and he had to reach for one of the tissues he kept by the side of his bed to wipe them dry.

The summer after that was hot, heavy skies with grey clouds and the promise of thunderstorms that hardly ever materialised. When they did they only seemed to make things worse, choking humidity lingering in their wake, and it was one of those mornings when the air weighed more than it was supposed to that, with a constant hand on the small of his back, Blaine led Kurt up the stairs to his bedroom and said, "Thanks again for agreeing to do this. And for driving here so early to pick him up."

"I still can't believe your lizard's called Charlie, Blaine."

"Well, technically he's Charles Geckzilla Anderson, but, Charlie for short."

" _Geckzilla_ ," Kurt repeated, someplace between disdain and disbelief. "That's even worse!"

"I was seven."

"It's no excuse."

"Right," Blaine said, shrugging the comment off because in the past few months he had learned to hear the affection in all of Kurt's tones, to tease it tenderly from the most unsuspecting words. "Come and meet him. I mean, officially. I know you've already met him before, but still." Their re-introduction was, if not strictly necessary, certainly not ill advised. Kurt had agreed to take care of Charlie for two weeks while Blaine and his parents explored the Upper Peninsula, but he was not very fond of Blaine's pet, and had made that clear the first time he saw Charlie flick his long tongue out to clear a speck of dust from his eyeballs. Blaine had explained the lack of eyelids in most geckos, laughed it all off but Kurt's expression remained narrowed in disgust, and he had shied from Charlie ever since, but never as subtly as he thought.

They stood in front of the terrarium watching Charlie and he watched them back from his fake tree branch, head and body pointing down, tail curled high above. "You wanna hold him?" Blaine asked, for all that between Kurt's expression and his posture it was readily apparently what his answer was going to be. He opened the Perspex gate anyhow, reaching for his pet and letting the little animal settle on his hand as he brought it out of the cage. As he walked the gecko from his hand to Kurt's, Kurt stilled. "He's not going to do anything to you," Blaine reassured him, but Kurt was staring at him with narrow-eyed scepticism and replied, "He's still a lizard, Blaine."

"Gecko," Blaine corrected softly, as Charlie began to explore, making his way up Kurt's sleeve to perch on his shoulder when he ran out of warm skin to roam, tail trailing limply back down Kurt's arm. Charlie stilled, tongue diffidently flicking out to clear his eyeballs. With Charlie on his shoulder Kurt moved differently, his habitual primness transformed into stiffness in a sudden metamorphosis, as if he could not decide whether he was more frightened by the thought of Charlie climbing any higher or the possibility of him falling off and getting lost in the cracks of Blaine's bedroom floor. Taking pity on him Blaine held up a hand, pressing it flush against his shoulder, and tried to coax Charlie onto it but the gecko ignored him, flicking his tongue again and refusing to move. "You're really warm," he told Kurt, who never shed his layers, not even in the summer heat. "No wonder he likes you."

Kurt's spine softened somewhat as he tilted and turned his head to better watch as his curiosity overpowered his instinctive distaste. He lifted his other hand and hesitatingly stroked a finger down Charlie's back. "He's soft," he said. There was awe in his tone, dilute, and he petted Charlie again. "I thought he'd feel scalier. And slimier, both at once."

"That's frogs," explained Blaine. "And amphibians in general. Geckos are reptiles, it's completely different." With tender fingers he finally nudged Charlie onto his other hand, and then trailed them over Kurt's shoulder, feeling like he was reclaiming it in some way. Kurt sighed, eyelids flickering, and after a final squeeze Blaine returned the gecko to the terrarium, latching the gate. "Ok, so, care instructions."

"Hold on," Kurt said, shifting to Blaine's bed and sitting down. He pulled a small notebook from his bag, cover wrapped in a collage of pictures and letters cut from old magazines, and flipped through it until he found the first empty page. Expectant and poised he looked up at Blaine, and the tilt of his head was unnervingly similar to the way Charlie would lay still, head half-cocked, for hours on end under his little heat lamp. "Ok, go."

"I think he may molt while I'm away," Blaine said. "He's due for it. Don't take away his shed skin, he eats it for the protein."

"Of course he does," muttered Kurt, with a quick dark glance at the terrarium, but making a note all the same. "What else?"

"How do you feel about crickets?"

"Uh," Kurt asked, "is that a trick question?"

"He likes fresh crickets."

"Absolutely not. I am not feeding anyone living animals, even if they're insects. Especially if they're insects," he corrected himself. "He's going to have to go vegetarian for a week."

"Ok, but you can only feed him things like watermelon or pears, no citrus."

Kurt repeated, "No citrus, no problem," as he wrote it down.

"Oh, and you're going to need some more bedding for the terrarium. But I'm out up here, although there's probably some in the garage."

He took Kurt's hand and pulled him unresisting from the bed, leading him down the stairs and through the house, with a quick good morning to his mother who was in the kitchen packing sandwiches and water bottles for the drive. Blaine was not looking forward to this trip. He enjoyed being outdoors, had done so since well before Louisiana two summers ago, and much more so after that, but the company of his parents was not something he often sought, and being alone with them for a fortnight now that he had much better, warmer things to look forward to was very unappealing.

Kurt had never been in Blaine's garage before. Whenever he visited they tended to seclude themselves in Blaine's room instead and hardly ventured past the kitchen. Blaine flipped the light switch, turning on the bright fluorescent lights and in the ensuing brightness Kurt made a surprised sound. "Oh! Is this the car you told me about, the one you and your dad... rebuilt?"

"We didn't do a very good job of it," Blaine confided. "It broke last autumn, right before the school year began. Then I got my mom's car, because I had to drive to Dalton every day." Even after all this time he had not managed to understand his father's affection for the car. To him it was no great loss because it had been no great investment, no great hope, but rather an unexpected chore.

Kurt, meanwhile, trailed a reverent hand over the driver's door. "Why didn't you take it to a mechanic?"

"I don't really know, actually," he shrugged. "I think after all that work my father felt like it would be admitting defeat to bring someone else in, that we weren't men enough to really fix it or something. So the entire thing was a waste. I could've told him that before we started."

"That's just foolish," huffed Kurt. "It's a beautiful car; you should take better care of it. You know dad is far better than me, but I could have a look at it if you wanted."

Instead of answering he stepped forward and pushed Kurt against the Chevy. They wound their arms tight around each other in anticipation of the days of separation ahead, their breath suddenly came fast and hot, mingling in the small space between their noses and between their lips until Kurt surged forward and kissed him quickly, pulling back to whisper, "I'm going to miss you."

"I know. Me too," Blaine whined, leaning in for a wet second kiss. "God, I love you so much."

Kurt tucked his face against the crook of Blaine's shoulder, breathing deeply. "I love you too."

It was so simple and straightforward, saying those words, but Blaine never felt like the ease with which they came to either of them lessened them. He did not feel like they were wearing them thin and distorting their meaning or their importance. Blaine was in love and he was loved and they were the best feelings in the world, and it felt spectacularly good to have someone to feel these things with after so long alone.

They heard footsteps approaching and instinctually pulled apart, although Blaine didn't want to and mourned the loss of contact and warmth. Kurt made an attempt at smoothing his wrinkled shirt, but Blaine didn't. He kept an arm wrapped around Kurt's waist as his father appeared at the door. "Blaine, are you down-- Oh, hello, Kurt. What are you two doing here?"

What does it look like we're doing, Blaine wanted to ask. Were he more spiteful he would have thrown this thing in his father's face before, how a mechanic's son had made him even more gay: in his dark moments he appreciated the irony of it all, but at other times he worried that it would be misunderstood, and in his father's eyes sour his relationship with Kurt into little other than an act of teenage defiance when Blaine would giddily tell anyone who asked that it was so much more. "We were getting some stuff for Charlie. Kurt's going to take care of him, remember?"

"Right, right," his father nodded absently. "Well, wrap it up, boys, because we really need to get going. It's a long drive."

"We need to get Charlie into Kurt's car first. Oh, and, dad, Kurt has offered to fix the Chevy with me."

At that his father perked up, his attention fully on them. "You know about cars, Kurt?"

"My father is a mechanic. I grew up around exhaust tubes and spare carburettors, much as it pained me."

"Maybe you'd like to take a look at it when we get back? Show us where we went wrong? Every time I come in here it saddens me, seeing it there like that."

"It'd be my pleasure," Kurt answered primly, and after another reminder from Blaine's father to hurry up they were left alone. Once they had found the bedding they returned to Blaine's room and packed Charlie's terrarium, unplugging his heat lamp and emptying his water bowl to keep it from sloshing around during the drive to Lima.

They had three sets of goodbyes, because the first two were interrupted by Blaine's father's drifting voice needling at them to finish up, and the last one, at the side of Kurt's car, was cut short when Blaine's parents came out of the door and locked the house behind them, ready to leave. The terrarium was on the passenger seat, buckled into some semblance of place, and there was a bag of supplies in the foot well. "Thank you for doing this," Blaine said one final time.

"Don't worry about it. Geckzilla and I are going to get along just fine, I'm sure."

"I was seven!" protested Blaine again. "And I was hoping he would grow to be, like, ten feet long. I was very disappointed when he stopped growing, you know?"

Kurt laughed. "You're ridiculous. Anyhow, I should go, before your father decides he doesn't like me anymore because I delayed the start of your annual Henry David Thoreau reenactment."

They hugged one last time, reluctantly pulling apart. Blaine watched as Kurt got into his car and backed out of their driveway. As Kurt pull away, one hand on the steering wheel and the other waving a fond goodbye, it dawned on Blaine that he had never listened to his father the way he listened to Kurt. He slid into the front passenger seat of his family's SUV. His father smiled briefly at him and passed him a misfolded map.

"Let's go, then. And when we get back we can get that car fixed up again."

**Author's Note:**

> Geckzilla is, for the curious, a flame morph crested gecko and looks [like this](http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w165/ksalz767/Morph%20Guide/ClassicFlame2.jpg); Blaine had childhood nightmares about some of the really creepy animals from the [Cambrian Explosion](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion) and I would promise this is the last overtly Darwinian story I write in a while, but one never knows. It is, nonetheless, the last story in this series.


End file.
